Currently, I'm the Creative Director at Atlantic 57, the creative consultancy of The Atlantic. Previously, I worked at NPR as a product designer and founded Russ Gossett. Illustration + Design. I try to keep track of all the pencils I see and write on occasion.

NPR Core Publisher

A flexible & powerful CMS built for public media

Core Publisher is the content management platform from NPR Digital Services. As product designer at NPRDS, I worked on the design and user experience for Core Publisher. Core Publisher is currently maintained by almost 200 NPR member stations around the country. Between 2013-2015, we developed a large initiative that introduced greater flexibility for the system while adhering to web standards and the latest NPR API developments.

The largest feature set was our transition to a responsive theme. During the 2-year long initiative to revamp the system we reimagined layout using fluid grids and flexible assets, typography introducing a clear typographic hierarchy, and readability in an open, single-column layout. Each feature was developed during our 2-week sprint process and we involved member stations and select station partners—as well as users and NPR superfans—to ensure that our features met the needs of the station as well as the user. By the end of 2015, we had designed and released every feature on our roadmap, including a new way to place media assets, tighter API integration, a more flexible way to inject underwriting, a custom homepage builder with modular news components, and the ability for stations to fully customize their masthead, plus crucial system improvements to speed up load time.

The CP team consisted of the product manager/scrum master, 2 engineers, 1 front-end dev, a UX manager and myself.

Perhaps the biggest challenge, because of the uniqueness of each station was that each design needed to be modular. Since flexibility was our #1 goal for stations, I developed a design system for each web component (header, navigation, content and layout, footer, and underwriting) so that the stations could customize the platform to their needs while maintaining the same visual language across the theme. The result was improved organic search performance, greater direct traffic and increased engagement with written content.

We also rolled out a persistent player in 2015, which allows visitors to stream their local radio while enjoying an uninterrupted browsing experience. Here are a handful of example stations using Core Publisher—my personal favs—KUOW, Michigan Radio, WAMC, WWNO, and a truly enlightening and investigative longform article from KBIA.

“When we ran our own website, our web traffic was flat for three years. Last year, we adopted NPR’s Core Publisher platform. This freed up our web team to focus on great storytelling instead of website maintenance. Our web traffic in 2014 was double the year before — up by approximately 100 percent in page views and unique visitors.” — Scott Finn (WVPublic.org)

NPR Composer

Playlist management and scheduling web app

Composer is NPR Digital Services’ most widely used web product. It’s used by hundreds of public radio stations across the country to manage on-air playlists and program schedules.

My role included designing user flows, wireframes and HTML prototypes so that we could quickly test our assumptions and iterate. As the project continued I created style guides and pattern libraries, which led to improved designer/developer collaboration.

The redesigned and reengineered Composer launched in 2013 and stations are still providing feedback…

“Lovin’ the album art and the new search. This may solve 250% of the complaints we get around music. You’re my new personal heroes.” — Jim Hill (KUNC)


“Everyone has agreed that this is a big upgrade, especially with ease of training and use - so many, many thanks for that!” — Kyle Smith (WYEP)

Litl ABC Shore

Edu-tainment for iOS Kids

The gameplay is simple: Help Crabby the Crab dig in the sand to find letters. Every 3–5 letter word the child spells correctly unlocks a piece of a sand dollar. Collect all the pieces and unlock more challenging words.

As the UX/UI designer, my role was UX documentation, visual design (exporting assets for iOS) and character design. I worked with a team of developers and another designer/animator at Litl to create this game for preschool age children. The objective of the game was to improve word and character recognition using gestures.

We found that children responded positively to a helpful character, like Crabby, because it is similar to the way a parent or teacher encourages and informs a child of that age.

State Street

Thinking with the business user in mind

At State Street, I worked on their in-house marketing team designing and developing microsites that were released alongside thought leadership and financial white papers. I also worked with partners overseas on their CMS and corporate intranet redesign. The goal: Create simple and intuitive interfaces for business users that were on-brand and on-time. Sketching and defining user flows became an important task for every project.

RGID

Illustrations and Infographics

I keep my pencil in everything I do, whether it's a logotype for a corporation or a fully-rendered editorial spot for your local public radio station.

The featured illustrations are two different series commissioned by Aeroflot Premium. The in-flight magazine commissioned me to illustrate 10 legendary cars and 10 exotic hotels. Check out more from this series and other illustrations at rjgoose.com.

Bubucheek Clothing

Think. Live. Rock.

Starting in 2009 as a way to see how my illustrations would look on t-shirts, I formed Bubucheek with 2 friends.

In just a few years we grew our reach to over 20,000 friends, followers and Instagramers on social media. We partnered with amazing organizations and also continued to give back to our community any way we could.

I continued to develop the visual direction for the apparel line until we closed our online store in 2015.